Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The grand procession of human evolution has delivered us to a pivotal
moment—a crisis that contains both creative and destructive potential. In fact,
you can’t have one without the other. At the height of any evolutionary crisis,
the two pathways appear side by side and illustrate the contrast between
traditional traits that no longer work and new ways of being that can carry the
species forward.

For years now we have become increasingly aware of what doesn’t work.
A consensus has formed, at least among those committed to honest appraisal,
that “we can’t go on like this much longer.” The consequences of a million
misguided choices have converged in our time to make that abundantly—and
depressingly—clear.

It has been much harder to look past the frightening scenarios of
impending collapse and see what we stand to gain on the other side. If we know
what traits can’t cross over this evolutionary boundary—a domineering and
rapacious relationship with the earth, for instance—then what will replace
them? What does a more evolved human look like?

We sense that the answer doesn’t lie in more or “better” technology,
or any “upgrade” to the existing machinery of western civilization. The
rational mind may not want to accept this, but in our deeper selves, we know:
What comes next must be radicallynew. It must not simply ensure
our basic survival, but also deliver what we have longed for and sought after
through all the millennia of our history: Freedom. Belonging. The peace that
comes from knowing who we are—and living in harmony with our true nature.

We know there is far more to being human than we’ve ever allowed
ourselves to be. We feel in our bones that our present devotion to the pursuit
of profit, property, power and privilege is an absurdity, that we are meant for
and capable of so much more. So much more.

The poet Rumi put it like this:

You sit here for days saying

This is strange business.

You’re the strange business.

You have the energy of the sun in you,

but you keep knotting it up

at the base of your spine.

You’re some weird kind of gold

that wants to stay melted in the furnace,

so you won’t have to become coins.

Say ONE in your lonesome house.

Loving all the rest is hiding

inside a lie.

Here’s the point: This truly “weird” way of living—hiding inside the
lie that we are small and helpless victims in an indifferent world—is already
headed for the evolutionary scrap heap. This is the trait—this alienation from our
authentic identity and sacred source—that cannot enter the future we have
collectively created. We will either grow into our true potential this
time, or we will perish.

As Rumi suggests, what has held us back until now is not fate, or the
whims of capricious gods, or any backroom cabal of conspirators. The guard towers
of this prison are manned by nothing other than our own thoughts and beliefs. Your
thoughts and beliefs. Day in and day out they reinforce your decision to “stay
melted in the furnace,” rather than take responsibility for the truth: There is
no world but the one you make.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because wise men and
women from every mystical tradition throughout time have been saying the same
thing. Yes, these ideas inevitably lead us back to the realm of spirit, and to
the thousand marvelous names we have for Mystery. It's a dimension we've tried
to ignore in modern times, a fact which has only served to deepen our
confusion. Happily, that wisdom is as available and inviting as ever.

Lately, however, the conversation has been joined by a new chorus of
voices: scientists at the leading edge of exploration into the fundamental
nature of reality. Turns out there is no “stuff” in our stuff, no tangible BBs
at the bottom of the pyramid of existence. Our universe is a unitary field of intelligent
and infinitely creative potential surging with energy. We participate in
turning possibility into particular reality all the time—through the content
and quality of our thoughts and beliefs in each present moment.

This marvelous capacity for aligning with universal wisdom in
consciously choosing what we think and believe—as a means of reshaping
ourselves and the world for a radically different future—is where the arrow of
human evolution presently points. It is the essential characteristic of the new
humanity currently emerging. It isn’t a short or an easy road, but it is the
one we are destined to walk.

Next
week I will discuss why harnessing the power of your thoughts has nothing at
all to do with dreaming up a new Mercedes in the driveway—and why the evolution
of conscious creative awareness is also a genuine revolution in the
making.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Four years ago last
Valentine’s Day, my wife and I became backyard chicken wranglers. On a chilly
Saturday morning, we acted on faith that spring was actually coming and bought
four barely-out-of-the-egg hens at Denver Urban Homesteading’s weekly market. I
had grown up helping to tend my family’s small herd of white leghorns, so I
knew it didn’t take an advanced degree to succeed—and I had experienced first-hand
the payoff we stood to receive in fresh eggs every day.

Never mind that we live in
a typical urban neighborhood with ordinances prohibiting backyard “livestock”
of any kind. That was not going to stop us. No
one will ever know they’re here anyway, we thought, our own silent uprising against Really Dumb Rules. Take that, Monsanto!

There was just one problem
(which fellow chicken wranglers have probably caught on to by now, nodding and
chuckling): Our little cotton ball herd of baby chicks was only mostly hens. Three out of four isn’t
bad, but that last 25 percent was all rooster. So much for stealth mode.

Now, the woman who sold
the chicks guaranteed hens, so we could have traded him in. But that just
seemed wrong, somehow. Sexist, certainly. Besides, it was a 50-mile round trip
to her farm on the prairie—hardly in keeping with our goal of more sustainable,
responsible living. And speaking of sustainability, wasn’t a rooster a
necessary part of the equation if we wanted continued returns on our
investment?

So, our daughter christened
him “Mr. Bernard” and we gave him full citizenship. (Let the court records show
that he has done his part to contribute several more cotton balls to the
community since his reprieve.)

But there is no denying he
is a noisy and aggressive little cuss. Once he really found his voice and his machismo, Issa and I expected to be met
at the door every morning by S.W.A.T. or a mob of people with pitch forks. We
decided to head that off at the pass by taking our most radical action yet:
talking to the neighbors and listening to their thoughts. In essence we said,
“We’d like to keep this guy around, but if that is intolerable to you then
we’ll settle for a potluck BBQ instead. You bring potato salad.”

The vote was unanimous:
Thumbs up on Mr. Bernard. Some even said they liked the “ambiance” he provided
as it reminded them of their rural childhood. One man threatened to buy a
replacement rooster himself if we got rid of the bird. Granted, not all
neighbors will be as accommodating as ours, and the experiment might turn out
differently on your block.

But I wonder what the
outcome might have been here had we erected a stockade of “private property
rights” and “you’re-not-the-boss-of-me” defensiveness. It might have cost us a
rooster to offer the neighbors a say-so. But what we stood to gain—a small step
in the direction of genuine community—was far more valuable. The relatively
trivial conversation about roosters planted the seed of an idea in our neck of
the woods that will surely come in handy as the current rearrangement of modern
life picks up speed: We are in this
together.

Here’s the part that’s most
important to our collective conversation about the need for a jailbreak and how
to go about it: Busting out of the faulty beliefs and habitual thinking that
imprison us does not always involve storming the obvious strongholds of power,
injustice, inequality and oppression. That’s our goal, sure, and we will get
there.

But sometimes the jailbreak
is about facing our small fears, escaping the daily ruts that hijack our
potential to be free, confronting little pockets of injustice and oppression
with courage and grace, building solutions out of whatever is at hand. In fact,
true crisis is never “global” even when it gets its own theme music on the
nightly news. Real trouble will always present itself right in your time zone
and challenge your beliefs—and the structures you’ve built to reinforce them—at
point blank range.

Can we just agree from the
beginning that there are no small or trivial freedoms? Every declaration of independence from old choices and worn out
ways of being is equally powerful and profitable in making a new world.

We have long since stopped
cringing every time Mr. Bernard reads the rooster riot act to the world. (By
now, the neighbors have all had a taste of fresh eggs.) And this morning we
heard a sound in the distance that brought a big smile to our faces: Somebody
else in the neighborhood has a new rooster.

(For readers with a taste for poetry I invite you to visit Words in the Wind, where I post a new original poem every day.)

Monday, September 9, 2013

As I walked up the hill
this morning to work a few hours in my family’s half-acre urban farm, my head
was sore from a stampede of news: Syria in the crosshairs of the White House;
economies swaying precariously like ten-foot stacks of Jenga blocks ready to
fall; the open wound at Fukushima; the deepening trauma of unemployment around
the country, and so on.

When I arrived, I tried to
discuss the latest with the green beans and winter squashes. They just politely
changed the subject.

“Here, have some food,”
they said. “It will make you feel better.”

And you know, it did. By
the time I came down to take up writing this post I was ready to focus on the
really important parts of the conversation. No doubt, we have pressing matters
on our collective agenda, but it is nice to know the eggplants can show us how
to keep a level head.

The Jailbreak Journals is dedicated to discussing three very big ideas:

--We are not free people (sorry);

--We are our own jailers
(via stubborn attachment to mistaken thoughts and beliefs about the “way things
are and must be”);

--There is a way out, and
it’s past time to get serious about finding it.

We are in desperate,
urgent need of a jailbreak. The economic, environmental, social, geopolitical,
psychological and emotional consequences of remaining behind bars—consequences
that in more prosperous times were easier to compartmentalize and contain—have now
converged to create one giant tipping point we can no longer ignore, as much as
we’d like to.

Bottom line: Our brand of
civilization is on very, very thin ice.

There is a palpable sense
of this reality in our society now. Everywhere you look you’ll find people in a
state of strained fatigue and volatility, even as they cling to the illusion
that everything is fine. In the opening chapters of Fellowship of the Ring Bilbo Baggins has lived an unnaturally long
life, supported by dark magic in the form of a “ring of power” he found in
Golem’s cave. When the cost of that unwitting alliance begins to catch up with
him, he describes it to Gandalf as the feeling of being “butter scraped over
too much bread.” Go into any Wal-Mart in the land and you will recognize that
metaphor in almost everyone you meet.

That’s because we are
under a spell too—a ring of assumptions about ourselves and the world that have
appeared to grant us magical power over the limitations our ancestors lived
under for millennia. As Daniel Quinn wrote in Ishmael, we’ve assumed that falling
in a homemade cardboard airplane is the same thing as flying (just because it happens to take a long time to hit the
ground). The airplane itself is made of assumptions—and we’ve believed them for
so long that we’ve lost the ability to even see them, much less question them
meaningfully.

If we are honest, we know
perfectly well that we are long overdue for a radical change in our living
arrangements, even at the cost of letting go of some things we presently think
we can’t live without. The truth is, history is likely to demand that we hand
them over anyway, so we might as well cooperate voluntarily.

Which begs the questions:
How? What now? These are the threads I propose that we pull on together in The Jailbreak Journals.

To begin, we must acknowledge
that, just because we catch on that we are all in this self-imposed jail
together doesn’t mean we agree about how to plan an escape. Even among people
who have started waking up to the awareness that something is deeply wrong with
the world as we’ve made it, there are strong magnetic poles pulling us in one
direction or another.

At one end are those who
think it is time to lock and load and do what oppressed people have always
done: find somebody to blame and make them pay. At the opposite extreme are
people who are devoted to fixing what is broken from within, using the traditional
tools of civil discourse and participatory politics. Both camps have reason on
their side and offer compelling arguments—and both are equally doomed to miss
the true opportunity now before us.

That’s because both
approaches leave the walls and the guard towers and the barbed wire of habitual
thinking and belief untouched. It’s as if the inmates down at the penitentiary
have chosen teams on the basketball court in the sad belief that the winners get to
go home and everything will go back to the way it was before their
incarceration.

Let’s be clear: There is a
time for direct action, though I will always prefer the way of non-violent
non-cooperation to throwing rocks and breaking things. And there is a time to
influence history in committee meetings and well-crafted legislation. The
jailbreak I advocate will empower both, and everything in between.

But the conversation we’ve
begun in The Jailbreak Journals is
not another argument over who gets to sit behind the steering wheel of our
“flying machine” society—and how best to get it away from the people presently driving
like drunken lunatics. Our purpose is to question the very concepts that led us
to build the contraption in the first place.

For instance, what if our
ideas about the nature of reality are in need of an upgrade? What if the mess
we have made is not just a matter of mismanagement, but is a reflection of
deeply held misguided beliefs about the world that will always give us the same
misshapen results until we learn to think something new? What if we still don’t
understand the power that resides in a single human being who has decided to be
free?

What if Martin Luther
King, Jr. had believed that black people were hopelessly broken and powerless,
victims of unassailable racism in America? Would we know his name today? Yes,
he actively and courageously marched and he organized—but it was his belief in
a better way, in a better human,
black and white, that led him to stand up and say, “I have a dream…”

What dreams are still
unspoken because we have not yet dared to believe they are possible and within
reach? What quantum leaps might we take if we do?

Let’s find out! Let’s
break out of the prison we’ve built of thoughts and beliefs that can no longer
hold us.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

JAILBREAK!It’s a good bet that if
you were to shout that at the top of your lungs in the exercise yard of the
nearest penitentiary, you would instantly have the undivided attention of every
inmate within earshot—and all of the guards, for that matter. You wouldn’t have
to stop and explain what you meant by the word, because everyone on the inside
is well aware of three important facts:

1. They are in jail.

2. They would really like
to break out.

3. They know where the
exits are.

In other words, people who
know they are inmates are already tuned to the frequency of freedom and poised
to leap when an opportunity comes along. But what would happen if you did the
same thing at the food court in the mall? In your office building on Monday
morning? At church next Sunday?

First, you’d certainly get
a lot of blank stares. Then, after a moment, the shocked silence would give way
to a kind of sarcastic amusement. Check out the nut job. How did he get in
here? She really should take her medication.

The point is, it’s nearly
impossible to inspire a jailbreak among people who a) aren’t aware of their
imprisonment; b) don’t believe it is possible to live any other way; and c)
wouldn’t know which way to run in any case.

This assessment isn’t
meant to be condescending. The fact is, it applies to nearly everyone—and
describes an engineered ignorance and a conditioned ambivalence. Like ordinary
prisoners, we are all under the influence of a thousand “corrective” forces
each and every day designed to mask the truth.

And it works—sort of.

True, we might be among
those who would mindlessly scoff at someone shouting jailbreak at a Fourth of
July parade, but deep down we know something is not right. For most of my life
I have experienced the sensation of being caught in an elusive trap I can’t
quite see. I feel it most clearly in moments of fear, defensiveness, anger,
lack, guilt and hopelessness. In times of stillness and silence I can almost
see past the bars on the windows and smell the fresh air of the free world
beyond. In this, I am certain I’m not alone.

And it is nothing new. People have
felt this way forever.

The Persian poet Hafiz
wrote:

There
is an invisible sun we long to see. The closer

you
get to the present, the brighter and more

real
it will become, even at midnight.

To
the poor slaves of this world with their

eyes
chained to coins and unforgiving, the

wondrousness
of the firmament can cease to lift

your
head and impact your manners.

What
wing would not become depressed within

a
snare, if that wing still has some spirit in it,

and
all your instincts want to taste that

stratosphere
above the known?

“Open
the door or die. Unlock the cage or die,”

my
master would say to me, when I was young.

(version by Daniel Ladinsky)

This deep hunger to be
free is why stories of hope, connection, forgiveness, liberation and unconditional
love are so powerful. These are messages carried on the breeze that offer proof
of a better world out there. They stir the heartsick suspicion that this other
place—this other way of being—is our true home.

And so it is! We are all
free and rightful citizens of an abundant and joyful existence. A whole new way
of living is ours for the imagining and the taking. There is no power able to
stand between you and this fact.

Except for one: Your own thoughts
and beliefs.

As you may have guessed
already, these are your true jailers. These are the walls and the steel doors
and guard towers and the men with rifles who patrol them. You and I are inmates
in our own minds. While some others certainly exploit this fact and coerce us
to stay put for reasons of their own, there is no force on earth capable of
keeping us there—but us.

How do we imprison
ourselves? In complex ways that boil down to a stubborn refusal to see three
simple truths:

1. We are made to be
free—and are free the moment we decide to be.

2. There is a new and
excellent world waiting on the other side of that decision.

3. The exits are located
everywhere. Anywhere. Pick one and go.

Until we see and believe
these things, we are destined to die in captivity—because we will never venture
to open the door. I, for one, am tired of the prison yard. Who is with me?

And we haven’t got a
moment to lose. This jailbreak is the only way through the evolutionary crisis
humanity has now entered. Our deeply flawed and constraining belief systems
have led us to a moment of tremendous challenge—but even greater opportunity.

Gut-wrenching work and
possibly scary times lie ahead. But if we find the courage to see differently,
think differently, live differently—to unchain our eyes from “coins and
unforgiving”—then nothing can stop us.